Yummy Fast File Transfers

Tim Cook Needs To Fix A Broken Apple

Apple is broken in every way possible. iPhone sales have fallen off a cliff. iPad Pro has a bend in the case. Watch is heavily discounted. Traffic to Apple Stores is down.

China’s economy is reeling and Apple suppliers are running for the hills. Worse, Apple’s iPhone customers have, en masse, decided not to ever upgrade again. I read it on the internet. They can’t put it on the internet if it’s not true, right?

Gimme A Break

Things are bad at Apple. Instead of reporting its best financial reports ever from the recent holiday sales quarter, Apple reported only its second best. Epic fail, right? Gimme a break. Broken worse than Apple are those who report on Apple and APPL (they are not the same).

The company revised down its expected revenues from $89 billion to $84 billion. That’s bad news because the iPhone provides roughly two-thirds of Apple’s revenue.

Wrong. That’s not why it’s bad news. If iPhone, iPad, and Services revenue stayed the same, and nobody bought a new Mac for the entire quarter would the news be any different? Still down $5-billion. More interesting news, maybe. There is something of a recession going on in China and that affects… insert the famous Mac360 drum roll here… Apple. And Samsung. And nearly any other major tech company with a strong presence in China.

Duh.

Apple CEO Tim Cook placed much of the blame for the shortfall on the China market. A number of factors, including phone pricing, strong local phone competition, and the brewing U.S.-China trade war may have played a role.

Duh.

This will be the first quarter in which Apple will not provide a unit sales number for the iPhone.

Just like all of Apple’s competitors have done. Forever. How many Pixels did you sell, Google? Crickets. How many of anything with an Amazon logo on it did you sell Amazon? Crickets. How many Galaxy-whatever models did you sell Samsung? Crickets.

Me senses something of a double standard here.

Analysts will be left to estimate unit sales numbers based on revenue and the all-important ASP (average sale price) number.

Guesstimates will rule. Looks like a level playing field to me. Everyone guesses. Apple takes home the most revenue and profits.

Apple would have looked much better had it announced that reporting change in front of a winning quarter.

Agreed. We’re at the intersection of Murphy’s Law and Change Happens. Apple’s executives predicted the best quarter of financials. Ever. They were wrong. It’s the second best quarter. Ever.

Cook believes that China’s tepid economic growth and trade tensions with the U.S. led to a decline in retail store traffic in the region. But a closer look at the developments in the Chinese smartphone market indicates that the blame lies with Apple as well.

Uh huh. An armchair quarterback watching the world from afar knows more about what is going on in China than Apple’s executives.

I think nobody knows more about taxes than I do, maybe in the history of the world. Nobody knows more about taxes

Uh huh.

Nobody in the history of this country has ever known so much about infrastructure as Donald Trump

Uh, yeah.

I think nobody knows the system better than I do

Uh, OK.

I know more about ISIS than the generals do. Believe me.

For obvious reasons, I stopped doing that. It’s easy to talk the talks, but not so easy to walk the walk.

Chauhan again:

Apple’s problems run deeper than just the Chinese market, which is the company’s third-largest source of revenue with 18% of the total top line. Cook has admitted that the upgrade cycle to new iPhones in some developed markets has slowed down.

Yet, iPhone sales have been mostly flat for four years.

Tim Cook needs to bring new users into the iPhone ecosystem, and that means making the devices more accessible to users in both emerging and developed markets.

That’s it? That’s the advice? New customers?

Based on Apple’s recent earnings, maybe there isn’t as much to fix as the armchair quarterbacks think needs to be fixed. The world has an economic problem going on, and Tim Cook can’t fix that.

5G? Meh!

About Wil Gomez

I live in Brooklyn, New York and work in Manhattan; a Mac owner for almost 25 years, and an IT specialist on mixed platforms-- Mac, Windows, and Linux. Read more of my articles here. My fiancée is semi-famous Kate MacKenzie. Follow her on PixoBebo.

Reader Interactions

« Next Article

Previous Article »

Comments

Sorry, but maybe the arm chair Qbs are right. Tim Cook is a boomer acting like a millennial. Jobs was a boomer striving to be a millennial. And f you dont know the difference, you whould switch sides. Steve made me want to buy every mac version every out out with the exception of a few of them… like that cube thing. Cook’s products make me wait 3 – 4 years between upgrades. I’m still using my 2008 mac pro (upgraded) because it was an awsome machine. It was my 3rd mac pro by the way. Yes, I drank the kool-aid and never regretted it. Now I am more or less like, Meh…. call me when something exciting happens cause, yeah…. its been a while.

When have the so-called armchair quarterbacks ever been right? They complained about everything Jobs did, too.

Millennials (echo boomers) were not even able to buy Apple kit when Jobs returned. If Jobs made you want to buy every new Mac and you haven’t bought one since 2008 then you’re not in a position to criticize all the new Macs launched under both Jobs and Cook. The rest of the world has moved on. Macs are selling at record levels for a reason.

More than 80-percent of Mac sold are notebooks. iMac Pro is as lustworthy as any Mac. Ever.

You wait 3-4 years between products? How is that bad for Apple? Sounds more than normal to me.

Primary Sidebar

Search Mac360 »

Sync Your Mac 8 Ways

Backup and sync your Mac eight ways with ChronoSync. Bootable, mirrored, remote, scheduled, local, iOS storage, and automatic backups. Perform trial syncs before the backup, get email notifications of each sync or backup as they complete, archive and restore.

ChronoSync is the site's sponsor this week. Set up' event based backups, sync files and folders between Macs many ways. Pay once, backup forever.